1. Field
The disclosure relates generally to techniques for secure distribution of media content/data, and more specifically to techniques for distributing media content/data in a two-phased fashion, where an initial distribution of a degraded form of the media data is followed by a supplemental distribution of supplemental media data after identifying or authenticating one or more recipients of the media content/data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Multimedia can be defined as a combination of different types of media (e.g., text, images, audio, video, and graphics) to communicate information in a given application. Recent advances in digital technologies have drastically increased the capacity of both data channels and storage. With the higher capacity of storage devices and data communication channels, media content/data has become ubiquitous, with this type of data now commonly being used in many areas such as entertainment, journalism, education, law enforcement, national defense, and the health care industry. The transition from analog to digital data as the preferred method for maintaining and distributing media data has made it easy to replicate media data without data loss. The lowered cost of reproduction, storage, and distribution has added an additional dimension to the complexity of the problem.
In a number of applications, media data needs to be protected from replication in order to control or prevent unwanted or illegal copying of such media data. Cryptography and watermarking are just a few of numerous known digital rights management techniques that are used to control or prevent unwanted or illegal copying of media data. However, each such technique has associated drawbacks that lead to undesirable affects. For example, use of cryptography has significant management overhead in creating and managing keys used to encrypt and decrypt data. In addition, such cryptography protection can be easily thwarted if a key is lost or stolen.
Use of watermarking, where a symbol or image is overlain over the media data to adversely affect its quality, does not easily allow for an end user to upgrade to a higher quality version of the degraded version if they desire to upgrade in a try-and-buy scenario where a potential purchaser/user of the content desires an initial preview of the data before making their purchase/acquisition decision.
What is needed is a technique for secure distribution of media data that mitigates/eliminates piracy of such media data.